“People like to make up genre names every once in a while. The people who make dubstep are exactly the same people who were making drum and bass — it’s just that they don’t want to call it drum and bass anymore, or jungle, the American word for drum and bass. Genre is a tyranny in music and it’s usually imposed from without.

and then Matthew perpetua piping up to agree with it!

"Funny that it’s Stephin Merritt of all people saying something very accurate about “dubstep,” i.e., that it’s essentially the same genre(s) of electronic music that was big in the 90s with a fancy new name, whether it’s Skrillex or James Blake or Burial. And that’s great! It’s not an insult! It’s the need for rebranding that is silly, not the music itself, or its lineage."

as Ewing comments, if the musicians come up with the genre names how is that "imposed from without"?

and as someone else says, "jungle as the American term for D&B"???!

but this is the same Stephin Merritt who, when i interviewed him in 1995, informed me that electronic music had not advanced one whit since John Foxx's Metamatic in 1980.